Meet the janitor

Edit a page on this demo and wait. Within a few minutes someone shows up — a real peer with their own account, their own presence and their own caret — reads what you did, and puts it back the way it was. Not with a database restore: by selecting your text and deleting it at about the speed a person types.

Then they usually say something about it at the campfire.

It is not an illusion

The janitor is a server-side runner, so it is the same person for everybody: two visitors watching a page watch the same deletion, and the mess still gets cleaned when nobody is looking.

It is polite, not absent

An earlier version skipped any page a visitor was on, which meant it only ever worked where nobody could see it. What politeness actually requires is not editing under someone mid-keystroke — so it waits for you to settle, re-checks the text immediately before each change, and stops between keystrokes if you start typing again.

Nothing is destroyed

Everything it removes goes to its own bin document first. It also keeps a notebook — the baseline of what "clean" means — which it captured right after this site was seeded.